Philip Levine

The Red Shirt - Poem by Philip Levine

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If I gave 5 birds each 4 eyes I would be blind unto the 3rd generation, if I gave no one a word for a day and let the day grow into a week and the week sleep until it was half of my life could I come home to my father one dark night?

On Sundays an odd light grows on the bed where I have lived this half of my life alight that begins with the eyes blinding first one and then both until at last even the worn candles in the flower box lay down their heads.

Therefore I have come to this red shirt with its faultless row of dark buttons, 7 by my count, as dark as blood that poured over my lips when the first word of hope jumped and became a cry of birds calling for their wings, a cry of new birds.

This is the red shirt Adam gave to the Angel of Death when he asked for a son, this is the flag Moses waved 5 times above his head as he stumbled down the waves of the mountainous sea bearing the Tables of 10, this is the small cloth mother put in my lunch box with bread and water.

This is my red shirt in which I go to meet you, Father of the Sea, in which I will say the poem I learned from the mice. A row of faultless buttons, each one 10 years and the eye of the bird that beheld the first world and the last, a field of great rocks weeping, and no one to see me alone, day after day, in my red shirt.